The Recurrence of Rhythm is an inquiry into the notion that the voice flows ??? a theme that continually recurs in the Homeric poems, Plato's Cratylus and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Through a re-interpretation of the meaning of rhythmos in pre-Socratic philosophy, I define rhythm as the particular manner in which the voice is flowing, and argue that it is the specific quality of phonetic writing to represent the flowing aspect of the voice. The Greek concept of rhythmos is held to be inseparable from the invention of phonetic writing and the transcription of the Homeric poems, and it is this new definition of rhythm that allows the thesis to engage in contemporary debates concerning the relationship between speech and writing (as developed by Derrida, Ong, Havelock, Parry, Lord and Prier). I also argue that the Platonic concept of rhythm qua metre provides an essential point of mediation between the Greek oral tradition and the history of Western literature, a move that sets the scene for a comparative study of Homer and Joyce. By developing an original concept of recurrence that pertains to both the repetition of themes in the Homeric poems and the heroic experience of living for the sake of the story, this thesis proposes that rhythm and recurrence are interrelated concepts that distinguish the lyrical and dramatic modes that structure the epic form of narrative found in both Homer's poems and Joyce's novels. Drawing upon the esthetic philosophy of Stephen Dedalus, I develop the dialectical theory of genre first outlined by Joyce in the Paris notebook, and argue that the latent lyricism contained in the narrative style of A Portrait is a proto-typical form of the interior monologue found in Ulysses. In opposition to the early modernist paradigm of Joyce criticism, this thesis rejects the notion that mythic archetypes function as Platonic ideals (i.e. the transcendent form of the modernist artwork), but rather holds that heroic themes recur in the mental stream of the modern subject, and manifest themselves immediately through Joyce???s use of the interior monologue technique.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/187161 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Martin, William, School of English, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of English |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright William Martin, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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